Science

Buoyed by a frenzy of interest in graphene — the famous material composed of a honeycomb of carbon just one atom thick — researchers speculated that silicon atoms might form similar sheets. And if they could be used to build electronic devices, these slivers of silicene could enable the semiconductor industry to achieve the ultimate in miniaturization. This week, researchers took a significant step towards realizing that dream, by unveiling details of the first silicene transistor1. Although the device’s performance is modest, and its lifetime measured in mere minutes, this proof of concept has already been causing a stir at conferences, says Deji Akinwande, a nano­materials researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who helped to make the transistor. Guy Le Lay, a materials scientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, agrees. Its carbon-based cousin graphene gets more attention, but silicene is catching up. Ref. 1.

Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies. Human sensory and motor systems provide the natural means for the exchange of information between individuals, and, hence, the basis for human civilization.

The recent development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) has provided an important element for the creation of brain-to-brain communication systems, and precise brain stimulation techniques are now available for the realization of non-invasive computer-brain interfaces (CBI). These technologies, BCI and CBI, can be combined to realize the vision of non-invasive, computer-mediated brain-to-brain (B2B) communication between subjects (hyperinteraction).
Quantum Biology.

Neuroscience. Genetics. Biotech Startup uBiome Aims To Sequence The Bacteria That Call Our Bodies Home. When you look at your body in the mirror, most of what you consider to be “you” actually isn’t you, at least not in a biological sense.

That’s because there are approximately 10 bacterial cells for every single human cell in the body. Startling, yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each human body may contain hundreds of thousands of species of bacteria, providing over 350 times the number of genes that is within our own genome, according to an article from Scientific American published last June. As we consider the issues of health and longevity, the big questions that naturally arise are, what exactly are all these bacteria and what relationship does each have with human physiology?
E. chromi: Designer Bacteria. E. chromi, a short film about a unique collaboration between designers and biologists has won the best documentary award at Bio:Fiction, the world’s first synthetic biology film festival, held earlier this month in Vienna.E. chromi tells the story of a project uniting designers Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and James King with a team of undergraduate biology students at Cambridge University.

Using genes from existing organisms, the team designed custom DNA sequences, called BioBricks, and inserted them into E. coli bacteria.The new E. coli—dubbed “E. chromi”—were programmed to express a rainbow of colors when exposed to various chemicals. Ginsberg and King helped the young biologists dream up a variety of possible applications for the invention.For example, E. chromi could be used to test the safety of drinking water–turning red if a toxin is present, green if it’s okay.

Fig wasp and fig fruit. Isolated patch of water, trapped under ice, sustains bacterial community. Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys may appear to be one of the least hospitable places on Earth.

They contain a frigid desert where high winds scour the rocky ground, and the only water present is in the form of ice, some of it left over from when the ocean extended into the valley over a million years ago. The area is so inhospitable that NASA has used it to simulate conditions on Mars. So biologists were probably very surprised to find that the area hosts a number of distinct ecosystems.
The State of Climate Science. Polls show that many members of the public believe that scientists substantially disagree about human-caused global warming.

The gold standard of science is the peer-reviewed literature. If there is disagreement among scientists, based not on opinion but on hard evidence, it will be found in the peer-reviewed literature.
One Astrobiologist's Plan to Save the Search for Alien Life. A conceptual illustration of the Europa Jupiter System Mission, or EJSM, which consists of an orbiter for both Europa and Ganymede.

Meteorites, not comets, may have brought water to Earth. Modern Earth is wet and temperate (last week's heat wave aside), but the early Earth was molten and hostile, meaning water and other volatile substances like hydrogen and nitrogen compounds must have been deposited after formation.

The likely culprits are comets—full of water ice and organic compounds—and meteorites, which were likely more water-laden in the early days of the Solar System. Knowing exactly where Earth's water and organic molecules originated would reveal a great deal about our planet's history and help us understand the environment in which life arose.

The Fabric of the Cosmos. PBS airdate: 11/16/2011 NARRATOR: Lying just beneath everyday reality is a breathtaking world, where much of what we perceive about the universe is wrong.

Physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene takes you on a journey that bends the rules of human experience. BRIAN GREENE (Columbia University): Why don't we ever see events unfold in reverse order? According to the laws of physics, this can happen. NARRATOR: It's a world that comes to light as we probe the most extreme realms of the cosmos, from black holes to the Big Bang to the very heart of matter, itself. BRIAN GREENE: I'm going to have what he's having.
BBC Universe – Dark matter: A chunk of the Universe is missing. Mystery of dark matter may be near to being deciphered. (Phys.org)—The universe is comprised of a large amount of invisible matter, dark matter.

It fills the space between the galaxies and between the stars in the galaxies. Since the prediction of the existence of dark matter more than 70 years ago, all sorts of researchers – astronomers, cosmologists and particle physicists have been looking for answers to what it could be. With the latest observations from the Planck satellite, researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, may be closer than ever to a solution to the origin of the mysterious dark matter.

The Planck satellite, which was launched in 2009, has extremely sensitive instruments that can map microwave radiation in the entire sky with great precision.
Twist in dark matter tale hints at shadow Milky Way - space - 11 April 2013. Read full article Continue reading page |1|2. Dark matter images reveal widest view of dark mystery. 9 January 2012Last updated at 19:07 By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Austin, Texas The survey dwarfs the previous largest map, shown at centre alongside the moon for comparison of size in the sky Researchers have released the biggest images yet detailing dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the Universe's mass. Each image, a billion light-years across, shows evidence of dark matter clumps scattered through the cosmos.
Dark matter’s tendrils revealed. BBC Universe - Dark energy mystery: The Universe is 'speeding up'
Hubble times Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy pile-up.

31 May 2012Last updated at 21:01 GMT By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News An illustration shows the night sky 3.75 billion years from now. Andromeda (left) fills the field of view and begins to distort the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to work out when precisely our Milky Way Galaxy will crash into its neighbour, Andromeda. The pair are being pulled together by their mutual gravity and the scientists expect them to begin to merge in about four billion years' time. A further two billion years on and they will appear as a single entity.
David Deutsch on our place in the cosmos. David Deutsch and Quantum Computing. ANNALS OF SCIENCE about David Deutsch and quantum computing. On the outskirts of Oxford lives a brilliant and distressingly thin physicist named David Deutsch, who believes in multiple universes and has conceived of an as yet unbuildable computer to test their existence.

Epic study confirms Einstein on space-time vortex around Earth. Einstein was right: There is a four-dimensional space-time vortex around Earth, and the spin of Earth does twist space-time. That’s according to NASA, in an announcement made 52 years after scientists first imagined how to test Einstein’s theory on space-time – before the technology to test it had even been invented.
NASA’s Kepler Telescope Finds Planet Orbiting Two Stars. 'Habitable' planet discovered circling Tau Ceti star. Immune System, Loaded With Remade T-cells, Vanquishes Cancer.

Flexible Adult Stem Cells, Right There In Your Eye. New drug could cure nearly any viral infection. Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago.
How to Find Limits of Mathematical Functions - Decoded Science
Why Mathematics Needs Limits. ‘The Character of Physical Law’: Richard Feynman’s Legendary Lecture Series at Cornell, 1964.

A k'wala's SciTech Daily. The National Academies Press. Entropy can drive the formation of complex quasicrystals -
From a thermodynamics perspective, all systems, even the universe itself, are all driven by two aspects of their state—entropy and energy. Any closed system will simultaneously tend towards a minimum energy or maximum entropy state—open systems behave differently, but the idea is similar.
Magnetic logic makes for mutable chips. Software can transform a computer from a word processor to a number cruncher to a video telephone.
Technofascism blog » Blog Archive » Double kill shot dealt to the religion of scientific materialism. The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements.